She turned, and seeing me, smiled faintly, but did not speak.

At her first glance, a speechless terror seized me.  This was my Annie!  The woman who for two years had been smiling with my Annie’s face had not been she!  The room grew dark.  I do not know what supernatural power came to my aid that I did not faint and fall.

Annie drew back the bed-clothes with a slow, feeble motion of her right hand, and pointed to the tiny little head nestled in her bosom.  She smiled again, looked at me gently and steadily for a second, and then shut her eyes.  Presently I saw that she was asleep; I stole into the next room and sat down with my face buried in my hands.

In a moment a light step aroused me.  Aunt Ann stood before me, her pale face all aglow with delight.

“O Helen my darling!  She is so well.  Thank God! thank God!” and she threw her arms around me and burst into tears.

I felt like one turned to stone.  Was I mad, or were they?

What had I seen in that one steady look of Annie’s eyes?  Was she really well?  I felt as if she had already died!

Agonizingly I waited to see Dr. Fearing’s face.  He came in before tea, saw Annie for a few minutes, and came down-stairs rubbing his hands and singing in a low tone.

“I never saw anything like that child’s beautiful elasticity in my life,” he said.  “We shall have her dancing down-stairs in a month.”

The cloud was utterly lifted from all hearts except mine.  My aunt and uncle looked at each other with swimming eyes.  Edward tried to laugh and look gay, but broke down utterly, and took refuge in the library, where I found him lying on the floor, with his face buried in Annie’s lounge.

I went home stupefied, bewildered.  I could not sleep.  A terror-stricken instinct told me that all was not right.  But how should I know more than physician, mother, husband?

For ten days I saw my Annie every day for an hour.  Her sweet, strange, gentle, steady look into my eyes when we first met always paralyzed me with fear, and yet I could not have told why.  There was a fathomless serenity in her face which seemed to me super-human.  She said very little.  The doctor had forbidden her to talk.  She slept the greater part of the time, but never allowed the baby to be moved from her arms while she was awake.

There was a divine ecstasy in her expression as she looked down into the little face; it never seemed like human motherhood.

One day Edward came to me and said,—­

“Do you think Annie is so well as they say?  I suppose they must know; but she looks to me as if she had died already, and it were only her glorified angel-body that lies in that bed?”

I could not speak to him.  I knew then that he had seen the same thing that I had seen:  if his strong, rather obtuse material nature had recognized it, what could so blind her mother and father and the doctor?  I burst into tears and left him.